Roquentin finally meets Annie, who has also felt the nausea.

While Roquentin feels sad for The Self-Taught Man, ultimate this man is the antithesis of the only way one can affirm existence-by making choices on one’s own, independent of other people (“Hell is other people”- No Exit). The disgusting nature of the conventional individual is illustrated by The Self-Taught Man’s crime of touching young boys at the library. The reader feels disgust-at existence, at Roquentin, who is as disgusted with himself as he is with things. Roquentin’s ranting lacks structure, it is disorganized, it is messy-as existence is messy. His ambivalence as he rants about “existing” and “nothing/nothingness” grew tiring-perhaps Sartre wants the reader to feel the weariness of existence by Roquentin’s continual talk about it, his piling up of nouns, his repetition of “exist,” his words with their negative emotional import. 98, in which he considers inanimate objects, plant and animal life, and finally himself, as existing beings and finds himself nauseated.

The entire novel is leading to Roquentin’s rant regarding existence beginning on p. But it is clear that she offers Roquentin some hope, however limited it might be, of escaping the nausea, the horror of existence. In my initial reading before completing the book, I did not realize what a significant role Anny played in the plot of the novel. Roquentin’s only peace is found by his thinking about Anny, yet that relationship is tenuous. When people behave as things, such as “the Self-Taught Man,” they become loathsome. Words such as “nothing,” “nothingness,” “darkness,” and “loathsome” are repeated regularly throughout the novel. She holds her hands over her face, but when she removes them and raises her head, she has no face at all-she lacks existence by being part of the masses who blindly go along with bourgeois society. Roquentin agonizes about how things exist and yet are “nothing,” that people in general exist and are “nothing.” Early in the novel Roquentin refers to someone with “no face,” which reminds me of Rilke’s character in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, who sees a woman on a park bench. Sartre's famous distinction between “being-in-itself” (a mere inanimate thing) and “being-for-itself” (the conscious being who asserts existence by making choices) was clearly in the text. How can a person deal with the loneliness and anomie of existence, of being 'thrown into the world' (Heidegger also The Doors' 'Riders in the Storm.')? In his novel, Nausea, John-Paul Sartre shows this problem through his character Roquentin.

Roquentin nausea